John Howard

Oned of the greatest conservative leaders of our time - Australia's John Howard - has been appointed to the Order of Merit. Only 24 people are members of this Order at any one time and all are handpicked by the Queen.

'I'm very honoured,'' Mr Howard told the Sydney Herald. ''It's a compliment to Australia and a recognition, among other things, of the respect the Queen has for this country. I'm very grateful for it.''

Mr Howard has long been a supporter of the constitutional monarchy and was Prime Minister when the Australian people voted against an elected head of state. "I've never hidden my support for the constitutional monarchy," he has said, "as part of the good governance of Australia."

"He has proposed a special tax on big business to fund a plan for six months’ paid parental leave*, something the old style Labor lefties, and the modern Green lefties, would cheer for. But momemts later, Abbott declares himself a traditional conservative who also wants extra help for stay-at-home mums and single-income families. Mao morphing into Margaret in the space of a single address to Coalition MPs on Tuesday."

The Australian Spectator is not just concerned at the alleged ideological inconsistency but also his lone-ranger approach to policy-making:

"For one thing, Mr Abbott went out on his own with the policy, leaving his shadow cabinet colleagues to hear about it practically with their morning papers. For another, after mortally wounding Mr Rudd’s emissions trading scheme by pegging it as a ‘great big tax on everything’, it is downright bizarre to see him proposing essentially the same thing — albeit in the service of a different end. And given that Mr Abbott famously declared as John Howard’s employment minister in 2002 that his government would implement compulsory maternity leave ‘over [his] dead body’, this is an incredible volte face."

The latest betting suggests that the first-term Labor government of Kevin Rudd is still hot favourite to be re-elected but former PM John Howard thinks Abbott has given the Liberals a chance. "Tony has a great potential to appeal to middle Australia, because he is more authentic than Rudd," he said. Continuing: "History tells you that the government will probably get a second term. But history is there to be remade and recast and turned on its head." The main purpose of his interview with The Australian was to attack Rudd's record of reform, however. "There are no economic reforms the Rudd government has undertaken," he said.

The graph below shows that Abbott has certainly narrowed the gap on "preferred PM" since taking over his party's leadership last November but Rudd still enjoys a reasonable advantage:

* Mothers will be paid "up to Aus$75,000 for six months' maternity leave through a 1.7 per cent tax on companies with taxable incomes above $5 million" according to the Sydney Morning Herald's assessment of Abbott's paternity leave policy.

The former Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, gave a lecture to the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Advanced Journalism this week about politics and the media.

He covered a variety of themes, some of which will be of interest to a British audience:

How the Daily Telegraph's coverage of MPs' expenses suggests that newspapers have not been entirely supplanted by the electronic media;

Why he believes most journalists are of a centre-left disposition;

The importance of talk radio for opposition parties;

His belief that Australia voted against becoming a republic in 1999 because most of the media were pushing for it.

He also went on to attack the media - in particular the Australian state broadcaster, ABC - for failing to challenge received wisdom on climate change:

"I do think that there is a complete unwillingness to accept that there is really any room for any suggestion that there could be some doubt or some scepticism about climate change. I still remember that extraordinary moment on the Lateline program in the middle of 2007 when that British program, I forget the exact title of it – the Great Climate Change Swindle (sic)* was shown. And the presenter of the program actually said that the views expressed in the program were not the views of the ABC, which I thought was quite an extraordinary thing to do, because, I mean, of course, they’re not, nobody suggests that, but there are plenty of other programs of equal prejudice on other issues that do not carry with them the dignity of that kind of disclaimer."